Short Tail vs. Long Tail links: What should your strategy be?

Link Building: Get quality long term links

Link Building Strategies at SES San Francisco

Link Building in August of 2010 with Jim Boykin at SES San Francisco was an extremely information session. He discusses short and long tail links and the differences between these. In addition, he informed us on how to secure those highly valued .gov and .edu links. Here are some key takeaways:

Types and values of links:

Short tail links: (cost associated): these links will bring 5-7% of overall traffic. The odds of being penalized are very low, but you still run a chance of being banned from search engines.

Long tail targeting (natural links): These links show trust of domain and trust of page. Excellent in the long term and show deep relevance.

So, how can you get links that will not cost you? These are not easy to obtain by any means, but they definitely will benefit you the most. The following is needed:

Time to research

Significant writing and editing

Time to contact sites

Time researching: research topic you think will be popular and relevant

Writing and editing: write great article on topic and write to all people linking to trusted resources

Time in contacting sites: write to all people linking to trusted resources

Your next steps should be:

Find related content to your topic that has significant back links.

Write a page about that specific topic.

Write to those sites that link to that topic. You must prove that you are “human” and not Spam. Subject Line should be unique and real. You can use majesticseo.com’s tool to find the exact domains for those back-links.

This is the best way to build authoritative and trustworthy back-links.

Below are a few more points beyond links:

CTR on 1st search results page is 89.85% and on 2nd page it significantly decreases to 10.18%.